Wildfire

Aug 4, 2018

1hgj171. The theme was "Four elements".

I was thinking of ideas for the LowRezJam, and came up with an idea that I wanted to explore during this 1hgj. Thus I created a 64x64 game (LowRezJam’s requirements) for the 171th 1hgj. There’s not much gameplay per se, but I thought I could see a game idea in there and I continued working on it.

By the time the LowRezJam ended, the game had turned into a turn-based puzzler, albeit with just one level. I continued adding levels to the post-jam version, and tinkered with the objects/effects in the game.

For the Kajam, I decided to add a level editor, instead of keep creating my own levels. Check it out!

This is where it gets interesting, because it’s adding “cloud saves” to a PICO-8 game. The way it’s done is by exploiting the GPIO flags that were added to PICO-8 presumably to be able to control simple lights on your Raspberry Pi or similar. Since the data needed to store a level is pretty light, I save it in these GPIO controls, which can then be read by the HTML5 app serving the PICO-8 cart. The data is then stored on my own server via a REST interface.

People have done this before me, for example kometbomb used this technique to post high-scores to kongreate and BenWiley4000 created a library to make it simple to use the GPIO flags.

However, it’s very cool to have a PICO-8 game that enables user-generated content! I can’t wait to see what kind of crazy challenges will appear!